Center

Explores

Move

Explorium Offers

Hands-on Displays

Eighteen children can fill 1,000 square feet of space with little problem and lots of noise.

Especially when there's a gravity track with a loop the loop and 10 computers and a giant bubblemaker and other cool gizmos.

Jonathan Schwartz, 9, slowly put his hand through a square, 3-foot-high bubble without popping it. "That won't cause it to pop," he told Nina Blustein, 7. She blew at the bubble and it disappeared. "That caused it to pop," he said.

Welcome to the Children's Science Explorium, tucked away in a tiny corner of the Royal Palm Plaza in Boca Raton, the center's home since 1989.

The explorium may not be at its current site longer than a year or two. If discussions with the Greater Boca Raton Beach Tax District are successful, the center will move its new home, Sugar Sand Park.

The first question the tax district's board of commissioners has to answer, however, is whether it even wants a science center to complement the science playground volunteers are raising money to build, said Bob Langford, tax district executive director.

"If the commissioners want to say, `Yes, we want to have one,' we lay out a footprint, and then we talk about who's going to pay for it," Langford said.

Once that question is answered, possibly at an Aug. 22 tax district board meeting, the focus could shift to whether the explorium will fulfill what is needed and where the money will come from to build the science center.

The explorium's space was whittled to half its previous size as a way to save money. Three large exhibits were put into storage. The rent at Royal Palm Plaza is too much for a small nonprofit organization with a budget of $200,000, Cohen said. Since the reduction in space, the explorium has been searching for a new home.

The explorium has one full-time employee - Cohen - and three part-time workers. It draws 20,000 people a year, including summer campers and students on field trips. It has 100 volunteers and would have more if it weren't for the center's limited space.

The explorium started out as the Microplex back in 1984 when it was formed by the South Florida Science Museum as an offshoot. Its first home was in the Boca Raton Mall, until the mall was razed five years ago.

When the proposal for a science playground at Sugar Sand Park emerged, the explorium joined the effort. Then the playground volunteers started talking about having indoor hands-on activities as part of the plan, as well as outdoor ones, and the explorium people realized this could be the answer, said Brenda Montague, explorium president.

"It seemed like the perfect marriage," Montague said. "It's just a matter of opportunity. The explorium has been looking for space for some time ... We would certainly fit in well with the Sugar Sand Science Playground."

The explorium has hands-on science experiments, like the gravity tracks which let golf balls circle a track upside down without falling, and the static electricity machine that makes kids' hair stand on end and the whisper pipe that carries a child's whisper across 100 feet of piping to a friend in another corner of the room.

The children enrolled in its summer camp can play with the computers, cut out cardboard images or watch the dissection of a shark. "What is dissection?" asked camp counselor Sean-Paul Henry, a microbiology major at Florida Atlantic University.

"It means cut up, in a surgical process," said Benjamin Hoffman, 9. Benjamin continues a patter of questions. "How can there be no blood in this shark?" and "A shark's not a mammal, right?" Other kids want Henry to cut open the brain.

Said Benjamin about the camp and the explorium: "It's fun. I told my parents I didn't want to go because I thought it was some big museum, but I found out I liked it, especially the computers."